I would suggest you hire some contractors to help you map your URL's at that level. Use Odesk or something similar. You will still need to go through them all with a fine comb but it should speed things up a lot. August 30, 2012

Just switched some of my LinkedIn information. I also like your idea for Inbound.org especially with news that Mashable may be gobbled up by CNN... and who knows how CNN is going to screw that up... I just know they will.

I agree, If anyone does find a way to include Pinterest into this it would be amazing. Pinterest sends more traffic to ecommerce sites than Facebook, Twitter and Google+ combined in the most recent studies done by multiple research companies.

How do directories get their city pages listed on Google Places? Do you create a different places account for each city with a link back to the URL? You would need potentialy millions of e-mail addresses to make millions of accounts because all the SEO experts I have seen say that you need a seperate places account per URL for you to get any type of consideration from Google for the SERPS.

I would say you should do a test over a month or 2 with a few products using the amazon approach and a few that are simply on your clients site. That is the best way to find out real world. We do tests like this all the time. We also do tests on static vs dynamic page content and find that static content 100% of the time trumps dynamic content.

Amazing post and very timely for me. We are doing a new build of our 2 year old site and will be switching to a cleaner URL structure for SEO, user experience and most of all to mimic our new site architecture.

I am not sure about other states but I would say that the auto-renew clause in a contract is a sticky one in California. It's basically illegal to have an auto renew or “evergreen” clause here in California. It won't hold up in court if you try to collect money and with the right lawyer such a clause could make the contract voidable at any point. That has been my experience and it got my company out of a contract with a telecommunications company we no longer wanted to deal with that had an auto renew clause.

I like metaphors and all but a whole blog post on one? Most people can come up with a metaphor on the spot that would relate specifically to who they are talking to. Maybe title this "Explain SEO to Realtors".

Or maybe you can make this a SEO metaphor contest. Everyone can post their favorite metaphor for SEO that they have used.

Also the secondary market for domains is hot. When someone sees trivial names are being bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars it makes someone’s property and house in say Michigan look pitiful when compared to a domain and any similar domains.

I don't know how long ago this happened but I would be interested to see how his rankings go up in a month from having those fans and interacting with them (not real interaction - Simply getting your posts on their wall google robot type interaction). I would venture to bet the SEO impact of these fans is more than you imagine.

I stopped reading after this statement "SEO is almost never applied to make non-relevant results rank for unrelated queries."

Obviously this is grossly not true. More and more scam and fishing sites are popping up to steal logins, passwords, credit card info, etc. They are rampant on the internet and well publicized. Why would Google be spending hundreds of millions in marketing to tell the world that people ARE in fact abusing SEO and they are working to take care of it?

Downplaying the profound abuse of SEO does not help in my opinion.

P.S.

I do not believe most SEO professionals do business in the above way. I agree that there is an inherent ethical code for individuals that are in the SEO field. My point is that it is being abused and we must admit it and separate ourselves from the negative side of SEO.

Thanks so much for this series. It has really helped clarify to my staff what sort of knowledge we need to get out of the information. People get overloaded quickly with all the info out there on websites.